Putin is his proxy

In my previous post I raised the central question of why a yappy little dog like Rod Dreher would bark in the night in defense of an international (and intranational) geopolitical thug like Vladimir Putin. Even if he disagrees that Putin is the all-purpose thug anyone older than 13 can clearly see he is, why say anything at all? Why speak out in 5 back to back posts, much less in his defense at all?

Because Dreher and his fellow Putinistas badly need Putin's services. Putin is their cutout. Putin is the Christian Dreher would be if only he had a really big brother like Putin to make that a safe and profitable option for him.

Putin is Dreher's proxy.

If you're effectively no more than the pseudo-religious-conservative version of Barbara Walters that Dreher is, running a pop-cultural blog on whatever is topical, with regular food segments for Pete's sake, a pseudo-religious-conservative version of The View, you need a cutout to say and do the tough, incontrovertible things for you so that you don't get your own hands unequivocally "dirty" and so as a consequence that you don't lose the vast chunks of readership you'd lose if those sentiments were directly attributable to you.

So instead of bashing Catholics or Protestants any more directly than you already do, you instead praise the authoritarian leader of a country where Catholicism and Protestantism can never hope to gain any real foothold and where the state-supported national religion just happens to be the one you most recently converted to. If you spoke and acted too directly yourself without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you might lose readership and influential people might stop linking to you.

If you disapprove of gays at all beyond your vague, mumbling, abstract references to religious liberty, Putin becomes your alter-ego. If you dared to speak and act so directly against gays yourself without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you would almost certainly lose your large, devoted gay crunchy-foodie readership and influential people like Andrew Sullivan might stop linking to you.

If you disapprove of America being a superpower in the world and doing the things on the world stage that America must do to maintain that status and not relinquish it to another, you let Putin do the speaking and talking instead and then, when the context seems safe, speak out loudly in defense of him. If you spoke and acted directly yourself without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you might lose patriotic readership and influential people might stop linking to you.

If you disapprove of an all-girl punk band scandalously named Pussy Riot, you feature their name copiously in your posts whenever the NPR and the MSM crowd do (because who isn't drawn to the tag "pussy"?), but you let your proxy Putin give them prison camp terms without raising any protest yourself, then long after the fact murmur that, well, that's not what you would have done. If you had spoken and acted directly without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you might have lost readership and influential people might have stopped linking to you.

In short, if your self-image is one of a stern, muscular Christian more sternly and muscularly Christian than any Christian could ever possibly have been in the history of stern and muscular Christianity, but if that self-image really lives large only in your nightly, Ambien-fueled fever dreams and in real life you find that prudence and profit dictate that your personal profile must inevitably be as quirky and harmless as that of a Zooey Deschanel...dude, do you ever need a proxy.

So Putin becomes your alter-ego and proxy. Putin is that tough guy you'd be - really, you would - if only groveling and simpering for a buck wasn't ultimately your highest value.